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Trust Breaks When Wrong Numbers Mislead Teams

How Jaffle Shop's data team rebuilt trust by inviting business stakeholders into the validation process

Summary

Marketing noticed their "high-value" customers weren't converting as expected. What started as a campaign performance issue revealed a deeper problem: revenue and customer lifetime value (CLV) calculations had been wrong for months, quietly misleading both the marketing and finance teams. The data team discovered the problem and needed to fix it.

Beyond fixing the technical issue, the team faced a trust problem. How do you convince stakeholders that your new numbers are correct when the old ones were wrong? Instead of deploying changes and hoping for the best, Jaffle Shop's data team brought marketing and finance into the validation process. They showed exactly what broke, demonstrated the fix with real data, and let stakeholders verify the impact before any changes went live.

The result? Trust rebuilt through transparency and collaboration, not just technical solutions.

Problems

Trust breaks: If stakeholders can't trust the numbers, why would they trust the people behind them?

  • Impact to business: Marketing targeted "high-value" customers who weren't actually valuable, while finance unknowingly reported inflated revenue.

  • Manual investigation and validation: Tracing the root cause meant hours of manual SQL digging, and the proving the fix was correct required complex custom queries, CSV exports, and Excel spot-checking.

  • No clear communication path: Technical SQL fixes don't translate well to business stakeholders who need to understand what changed and why they should trust the new numbers.

Solutions

  • Visibility: Make what changed instantly clear
    With breaking change analysis, you can identify that only `customer_segments` would be affected downstream, and use column-level lineage to trace which columns are impacted.

  • Verifiability: Prepare evidence and bring stakeholders into the loop
    All findings, queries, and impacts documented in one checklist, making review and approval straightforward for both technical and business teams.

  • Velocity: Build repeatable processes for sustainable speed
    With one-click sharing, the interactive UI gives stakeholders the complete story which they can explore themselves. Follow the developer's thought process step-by-step, examine the evidence firsthand, and ask informed questions based on what they discover.

Trust, Verify, Ship

Cut dbt review time by 90% and ship accurate data fast